W. Averell Harriman - World War II Diplomacy

World War II Diplomacy

Beginning in the spring of 1941, he served President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a special envoy to Europe and helped coordinate the Lend-Lease program. He was present at the meeting between FDR and Winston Churchill at Placentia Bay in August 1941, which yielded the Atlantic Charter, a common declaration of principles of the US and the UK. He was subsequently dispatched to Moscow to negotiate the terms of the Lend-Lease agreement with the Soviet Union. His promise of $1 billion in aid technically exceeded his brief. Determined to win over the doubtful American public, he used his own funds to purchase time on CBS radio to explain the program in terms of enlightened self-interest. This skepticism lifted with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

On November 25, 1941 (twelve days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), he noted that "The United States Navy is shooting the Germans – German submarines and aircraft at sea."

In the summer of 1942, Harriman accompanied Churchill to Moscow for a second meeting with Stalin. His able assistance in explaining why the western allies were opening a second front in North Africa instead of France earned him the post of US ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1943.

At the Tehran Conference in late 1943 Harriman was tasked with placating a suspicious Churchill while Roosevelt attempted to gain the confidence of Stalin. This conference made the divisions between the US and Britain about the postwar world clearer. Churchill was intent on carving the postwar world into spheres of influence while the US upheld the principles of self-determination laid out in the Atlantic Charter. Harriman delivered the news that the spheres approach was unsatisfactory to the US for this reason. Furthermore, if this was the driving concept behind the peace, it would give Stalin a free hand in eastern Europe.

Harriman also attended the Yalta Conference where he encouraged taking a stronger line with the Soviet Union—especially on questions of Poland. After Roosevelt's death, he attended the final "Big Three" conference at Potsdam. Although the new president, Harry Truman, was receptive to his increasingly hard stance against the Soviets, the new secretary of state, James Byrnes, sidelined him. While in Berlin, he noted the tight security imposed by Soviet military authorities and the quick beginnings of a program of reparations by which the Soviets were stripping out German industry.

In 1945, while Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Harriman was presented with a Trojan Horse gift. In 1952, the gift, a carved wood Great Seal of the United States, which had adorned "the ambassador’s Moscow residential office" in Spaso House, was found to be bugged.